Charles Dickens

Topic:

Charles Dickens' writing style

Notes:

1. How he uses houses to symbolize the people who inhabit them:
2. Dickens often created the episodes as they were being extended. His stories have a particular rhythm, shown by cliffhangers to keep readers looking forward to the next chapter.
3. Uses an appearance description to imply what the characters personality is.
4. He uses description, metaphors/similes, imagery, & personification to capture the character's personality and traits. Dickens' description of Mr. Jagger's office in the Great Expectations, he uses to illustrate Mr. Jagger's dark, dreary, & gloomy personality. The history of English literature, many writers use possessions to represent the person who owns them.
5. His work has been admired for its capacity and grasp of speech and indifferent personalities by writers such as George Gissing, Leo Tolstoy and G. K. Chesterton, others, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, criticized it for emotionalism and doubtfulness.
6. In 1833, Dickens' first story, A Dinner at Poplar Walk was published in the London periodical, Monthly Magazine.
7. Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
8. Dickens loved the style of 18th century Gothic romance.
9. One "character" is vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself.
10. His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comedic touch.
11. Comparing stocks and shares to orphans, tug boats to people, or furniture to dinner-party guests are some of Dickens' acclaimed flights of fancy.
12. A lot of his characters' names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played to advance the storyline, for example Mr. Murdstone in his novel David Copperfield, is clearly the combination of "murder" and stony coldness.
13. Literary style is a mixture of fantasy and realism.
14. Dickens became famous for his illustration of hardships of the working class, his detailed and evolved plots, and his humor.
15. He's probably most famed for the characters he has created. They capture the everyday human and create characters that readers could relate to.
16. He wrote many novels, each filled with believable personalities and very clear physical descriptions.
17. The author worked closely with his illustrators informing them with summaries of his work at the outset and ensuring that his characters and settings were how he envisioned them.
18. Characters were based on people he knew.
19. Dickens's started off his literary career writing papers for newspapers most of his stories are in an episodic form.
20. Using cliff hanger endings he was able to keep his readers interested in his stories.
21. Dickens also loves to employ incredible circumstances in his books.
22. In a Christmas Carole Dickens uses music and mysterious ghosts to bring to bring an old miser the message of Christmas.
23. Dickens's work for charitable organizations foreshadowed the Social Gospel.
24. Dickens loved children. He portrayed them with sympathy and understanding.
25. His enduring comic characters are part of the culture.
26. He is known as well for exposing the wretchedness of the downtrodden, for his anger at their heartless oppression and for his contribution to the celebration of Christmas
27. An enormously successful author and performer of his own work, he was the conscience of Victorian England.
28. Dickens's took the approach that good will triumph over evil sometimes even in very unexpected ways and he used the method of incredible circumstances to show his outlook.
29. He has a strong comic touch.
30. The characters are among the most memorable names in English literature, certainly their names are.
31. Charles Dickens was a well known personality and his novels were immensely popular during his lifetime.
32. His first full novel The Pickwick Papers brought him immediate fame and this fame continued right through his career.
33. He maintained a high quality in all his writings and although never departing greatly from his typical “Dickensian” style he did experiment with different themes, moods and genres.
34. His popularity has waned little since his death and he is still one of the best known and most read of English authors.
35. At least 180 movies and TV adaptations based on Dickens’ works help confirm his success.
36. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime.
37. Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged at the heart of empire.
38. Through his journalism he campaigned of specific issues such as sanitation and the workhouse but his fiction was probably all the more powerful in changing opinion.
39. Several of his children wrote of their memories of their father or prepared his surviving correspondence for publication but his great-granddaughter, Monica Dickens, would follow in his footsteps as a writer of novels.
40. His works, with their vivid descriptions of life at the time, mean that the whole of Victorian society is often simply described as Dickensian. Following his death in 1870 a greater degree of realism entered literature probably in reaction to Dickens’ own tendency towards the picaresque and ridiculous.

Thesis:

Even though some authors criticized Charles Dickens' writing for it's emotionalism and doubtfulness, many praised it for how he uses possessions or their name to represent the person or who owns them. Charles uses description, methaphors/similes, imagery, and personification to capture the character's personality and traits. Dickens loved the style of 18th century Gothic Romance.

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